There are many systems commercially available whereby voice messages can be sent to designated recipients. These are commonly known as voicemail systems wherein each author or subscriber, is assigned a section of a disk called a mailbox in which the author's messages are stored. When one subscriber, the author, sends a message to another subscriber, the recipient, that message is delivered to the recipient's mailbox and is read the next time the recipient logs into the system. Such a system is shown and described in co-pending patent application Ser. No. 07/689,138 entitled PRIORITY VOICE MESSAGE DELIVERY SYSTEM.
After a recipient logs onto the system and accesses a message, he may leave the message in the mailbox for future reference or cancel the message. Once a message has been placed into the mailbox of a recipient, the author no longer has any control over that message and there is no way the recipient can be prevented from having access to the message if a mistake has occurred.
There are times when messages are sent and it is subsequently learned that a mistake has occurred. Either the message is sent to the wrong recipient or the recipient to whom it is sent is no longer a subscriber and does not have access to the system. With present systems, there is no mechanism whereby situations of this type can be rectified.
Clearly it would be advantageous to provide a system and method whereby voicemail messages can be retrieved by an author or sender.